Daily Quotes

March 3rd, 2015
“How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them!”- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac

March 2nd, 2015
“Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place, not for another hour but this hour…”- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

February 27th, 2015
“I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptation. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience, etc., don’t get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep picking ourselves up each time…The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give up.”- C.S. Lewis, Letters, January 20, 1942

February 26th, 2015
“If people knew what Matisse, supposedly the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome to manage to capture that light which has never left him, if people knew all that, they would also realize that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials.”- Henri Matisse, interview, Matisse on Art

February 25th, 2015
“I like my town but I can’t say exactly what I like about it. I don’t think it’s the smell. I’m too accustomed to the monuments to want to look at them. I like certain lights, a few bridges, cafe terraces. I love passing through a place I haven’t seen for a long time.”- George Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, “The Town”

February 24th, 2015
“There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work…that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself…The fact is, a person is so formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.”- Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

February 23rd, 2015
“I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”- Willa Cather, My Antonia

February 20th, 2015
“A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.”- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

February 19th, 2015
“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything… we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to realize it as such.”- Henry Miller, The Henry Miller Reader

February 18th, 2015
“We change, but always at a cost: to win this you lose that.”- Geoffrey Wolff, “Apprentice” in A Day at the Beach

February 17th, 2015
“At these best moments a great humility fused with a great ambition: to be only what I was, but to the utmost of what I was.”- Stephen Spender, World Within World

February 13th, 2015
“Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.”- Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness

February 12th, 2015
“She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

February 11th, 2015
“Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it’s different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.”- Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

February 10th, 2015
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”- G.K. Chesterton, “On Pleasure-Seeking”

February 9th, 2015
“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”- Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings

February 5th, 2015
“I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.”- Alberto Giacometti, Giacometti: A Biography

February 4th, 2015
“I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”- Willa Cather, My Antonia

February 3rd, 2015
“Energy creates energy. It is by spending myself that I become rich.”- Sarah Bernhardt

February 2nd, 2015
“Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”- Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

January 30th, 2015
“There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom!”- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

January 29th, 2015
“Humor is the antidote to over thinking. It’s a way of saying that life is paradoxical. Humor contains contradictions; it does not resolve them but revels in them. It says that the right way to exist among the contradictions, paradoxes, and absurdities of life is to cope with them through laughter.”- Bob Mankoff, How About Never: Is Never Good For You

January 28th, 2015
“Anxiety and Ennui are the Scylla and Charybdis on which the bark of human happiness is most often wrecked.”- William Edward Hartpole Lecky, The Map of Life

January 27th, 2015
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”- William Morris

January 22nd, 2015
“But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.”- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

January 21st, 2015
“An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.”- Mark Twain, Notebook

January 20th, 2015
“I have reached the stage now where luxury is not in fine possessions but in carefree possessions, and the greatest luxury of all would be the completely expendable.”- Nan Fairbrother, The House in the Country

January 19th, 2015
“Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.”- William James, The Principles of Psychology

January 16th, 2015
“Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.”- Elias Canetti, Notes from Hampstead

January 15th, 2015
“Silence was the cure, if only temporarily, silence and geography. But of what was I being cured? I do not know, have never known. I only know the cure. Silence, and no connections except to landscape.”- Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young

January 14th, 2015
“There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.”- Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self

January 13th, 2015
“To be driven by our appetites alone is slavery, while to obey a law that we have imposed on ourselves is freedom.”- Jean-Jacques Rosseau, The Social Contract

January 12th, 2015
“Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.”- Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness

January 9th, 2015
“Man’s life is a progress, and not a station.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation”

January 8th, 2015
“How strange painting is, it delights us with representations of objects that are not pleasing in themselves!”- Eugene Delacroix, The Journal of Eugene Delacroix

January 7th, 2015
“Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.”- Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflection

January 6th, 2015
“What so great happiness as to be beloved, and to know that we deserve to be beloved? What so great misery as to be hated, and to know that we deserve to be hated?”- Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

January 5th, 2015
“If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”- Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”

January 2nd, 2015
“The Natural History Museum is open to the public on Tuesdays and Fridays. Elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus; extraordinary animals! Rubens rendered them marvelously. I had a feeling of happiness as soon as I entered the place and the further I went the stronger it grew. I felt my whole being rise above commonplaces and trivialities and the petty worries of my daily life. What an immense variety of animals and species of different shapes and functions!”- Eugene Delacroix, Journal

January 1st, 2015
“I have reached the stage now where luxury is not in fine possessions but in carefree possessions, and the greatest luxury of all would be the completely expendable.”- Nan Fairbrother, The House in the Country

December 31st, 2014
“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything… we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to realize it as such.”- Henry Miller, The Henry Miller Reader

December 30th, 2014
“To enjoy the excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its vices and ill effects,–to have the sweet, and leave the bitter untasted,–that has been my study. The preachers tell us that this is impossible. It seems to me that hitherto I have succeeded fairly well. I will not say that I have never scorched a finger,–but I carry no ugly wounds.”
Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

December 29th, 2014
“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”
Gertrude Stein, Paris France

December 26th, 2014
“When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.”
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

December 25th, 2014
“The comfort of it in her hours of leisure was extreme. She could go there after any thing unpleasant below, and find immediate consolation in some pursuit, or some train of thought at hand. Her plants, her books…her writing desk, and her works of charity and ingenuity, were all within her reach…she could scarcely see an object in that room which had not an interesting remembrance connected with it.”
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

December 24th, 2014
“We change, but always at a cost: to win this you lose that.”
Geoffrey Wolff, A Day at the Beach, “Apprentice”

December 23rd, 2014
“No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.”- Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

December 22nd, 2014
“Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation.”- W.H. Sheldon

December 19th, 2014
“I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of Faults than I had imagined, but I had the Satisfaction of seeing them diminish.”- Benjamin Franklin

December 18th, 2014
“It has been well observed that the misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.”- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

December 17th, 2014
“Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature—not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant…. As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.”- C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

December 16th, 2014
“It has been well observed that the misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexatious continuous repeated.”- Samuel Johnson, “Pope,” in Selected Writings

December 15th, 2014
“We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one’s life without a sense of time to squander it.”- Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey

December 12th, 2014
“I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.”- Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” The Palm at the End of the Mind

December 11th, 2014
“A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”- Eudora Welty

December 10th, 2014
“So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.”- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

December 9th, 2014
“When asked, “What disturbs him now about himself?” E. B. White answered, “I am bothered chiefly by my little fears that are the same as they were almost 70 years ago. I was born scared and am still scared. This has sometimes tested my courage almost beyond endurance.”- E.B. White, quoted in “Notes and Comment by Author,” by Israel Shenker, New York Times, July 11, 1969

December 8th, 2014
“The years from 7 to 13 seem to be particularly formative. We are young enough to be innocent and impressionable, yet old enough to think and feel deeply about what is happening to us.”- Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Mr. Tibbits’s Catholic School

December 5th, 2014
“I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.”- Giacometti, in Giacometti: A Biography by James Lord

December 4th, 2014
“To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise…Let him take a course of chemistry, or a course of rope-dance, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself.”- Samuel Johnson in James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson

December 3rd, 2014
“I’m glad to report that even now, at this late day, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me—more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears. I can remember, really quite distinctly, looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight years old and thinking, ‘This is where I belong, this is it.”- E. B. White, letter to Stanley Hart White January 1947

December 2nd, 2014
“But if a man has commonly a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do not deny that molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere….But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man…to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty I do not speak here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental limitations that are always falling across our path – bad weather, confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments or arrangements…”- G.K. Chesterton, “The Advantages of Having One Leg.”

December 1st, 2014
“I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose.”- Simone Weil, Waiting For God

November 28th, 2014
“We change, but always at a cost: to win this you lose that.”- Geoffrey Wolff, A Day at the Beach, “Apprentice”

November 27th, 2014
“I have reached the stage now where luxury is not in fine possessions but in carefree possessions, and the greatest luxury of all would be the completely expendable.”- Nan Fairbrother, The House in the Country

November 26th, 2014
“There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.”- Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self

November 25th, 2014
“It was on a bright day of midwinter, in New York. The little girl who eventually became me, but as yet was neither me nor anybody else in particular, but merely a soft anonymous morsel of humanity—this little girl, who bore my name, was going for a walk with her father. The episode is literally the first thing I can remember about her, and therefore I date the birth of her identity from that day.”- Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

November 24th, 2014
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.”- Fred “Mr.” Rogers

November 21st, 2014
“We change, but always at a cost: to win this you lose that.”- Geoffrey Wolff, A Day at the Beach, “Apprentice”

November 20th, 2014
“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.”- Edward St. Aubyn, G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

November 19th, 2014
“He knew that under the tall grass of an apparently untamed future the steel rails of fear and habit were already laid. What he suddenly couldn’t bear, with every cell in his body, was to act out the destiny prepared for him by his past, and slide obediently along those rails, contemplating bitterly all the routes he would rather have taken.”- Edward St. Aubyn, Some Hope

November 18th, 2014
“So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.”- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

November 17th, 2014
“In my opinion, there are two types of perfect. The first is the type that seems so obvious and intuitive to you and everyone else that in a perfect world is would simply be considered standard; but, in reality, in our flawed world, what should be considered standard is actually so rare that it has to be elevated to the level of ‘perfect.’ This is the type of perfect that makes you and most other people think, ‘Why isn’t everything like this? Why is it so hard to find…’ a black V-neck cotton sweater, or a casual non-chain restaurant with comfortable booths, etc.–‘that is just exactly the way everyone knows something like this should be?’ ‘Perfect,’ we all say with relief when we finally find something like this that is exactly as it should be. “Perfect. Why was that so hard to find?’
“The other type of perfect is the type you never could have expected and then could never replicate.”- B. J. Novak, “Sophia,” in One More Thing

November 14th, 2014
“A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”- Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

November 13th, 2014
“It reminds us that our only but wholly adequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole. It suggests that even while we think that we are egotists we are living to ends outside ourselves.”- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

November 12th, 2014
“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything… we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to realize it as such.”- Henry Miller, The Henry Miller Reader

November 10th, 2014
“Some beautiful things are more dazzling when they are still imperfect than when they have been too perfectly crafted.'”- La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections

November 7th, 2014
Jonathan Haidt writes that his old friend Greg called him. Greg’s wife Amy had left him for another man, a psychopath, and taken with her the couple’s two young daughters. Eventually the couple divorced, and Greg got custody, but his whole life was overturned. Haidt writes:
“And then Greg said something so powerful that I choked up. Referring to the often sad and moving solo that is at the heart of many operas, he said: ‘This is my moment to sing that aria. I don’t want to, I don’t want to have this chance, but it’s here now, and what am I going to do about it? Am I going to rise to the occasion?'”- Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis

November 6th, 2014
“It has been well observed that the misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexatious continuous repeated.”- Samuel Johnson, “Pope,” in Selected Writings

November 5th, 2014
“I have reached the stage now where luxury is not in fine possessions but in carefree possessions, and the greatest luxury of all would be the completely expendable.”- Nan Fairbrother, The House in the Country

November 4th, 2014
“Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.”-Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man,” The Poetry of Robert Frost

November 3rd, 2014
“True life is lived when tiny changes occur.”- Leo Tolstoy

October 31st, 2014
“The Natural History Museum is open to the public on Tuesdays and Fridays. Elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus; extraordinary animals! Rubens rendered them marvelously. I had a feeling of happiness as soon as I entered the place and the further I went the stronger it grew. I felt my whole being rise above commonplaces and trivialities and the petty worries of my daily life. What an immense variety of animals and species of different shapes and functions!”- Eugene Delacroix, Journal

October 30th, 2014
“Pessimism like calumny is easy to do, and attracts immediate attention. The gossiper and the writer may find this out soon enough, and a little encouragement from the current mood will procure them successes that bring endless imitators in their trail. On the other hand saying good things about life in general and individuals in particular and making it interesting is a serious task which few can achieve with credit.”- Bernard Berenson, Sunset and Twilight

October 29th, 2014
“Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.”- William James, The Principles of Psychology

October 28th, 2014
“I have reached the stage now where luxury is not in fine possessions but in carefree possessions, and the greatest luxury of all would be the completely expendable.”- Nan Fairbrother, The House in the Country

October 27th, 2014
“An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.”- Mark Twain, Notebook

October 24th, 2014
“I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.”- Henry David Thoreau, Journal

October 23rd, 2014
“Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.”- Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness

October 22nd, 2014
“To be driven by our appetites alone is slavery, while to obey a law that we have imposed on ourselves is freedom.”- Jean-Jacques Rosseau, The Social Contract

October 21st, 2014
“Sir, you must not neglect doing a thing immediately good from fear of remote evil; –from fear of its being abused.”- Samuel Johnson, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson

October 20th, 2014
“There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.”- Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self

October 17th, 2014
“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”- Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

October 16th, 2014
“What is one’s personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.”- Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

October 15th, 2014
“I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within.”- Carl Jung

October 14th, 2014
“And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up.”- John Updike, Self-Consciousness

October 13th, 2014
“Happiness and misery consist in a progression towards better or worse; it does not matter how high up or low down you are, it depends not on this, but on the direction in which you are tending.”- Samuel Butler

October 10th, 2014
“What we want out of a vacation changes as we age. It changes from vacation to vacation. There was a time when it was all about culture for me. My idea of a real break was to stay in museums until my legs ached and then go stand in line to get tickets for an opera or a play. Later I became a disciple of relaxation and looked for words like beach andmassage when making my plans. I found those little paper umbrellas that balanced on the side of rum drinks to be deeply charming then. Now I strive for transcendent invisibility and the chance to accomplish the things I can’t get done at home. But as I pack up my room at the Hotel Bel-Air, I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.”- Ann Patchett, “Do Not Disturb,” in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

October 9th, 2014
“Silence was the cure, if only temporarily, silence and geography. But of what was I being cured? I do not know, have never known. I only know the cure. Silence, and no connections except to landscape.”- Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young

October 8th, 2014
“Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For It is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.”- Elias Canetti, Notes from Hampstead

October 7th, 2014
“It is never easy to confront life-changing news, especially when you are deeply embroiled in the everyday and the banal, which we always are. They absorb almost everything, make almost everything small, apart from the few events that are so immense that they lay waste to all the everyday trivia around you.”- Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 2

October 6th, 2014
“To be mature you have to realize what you value most. It is extraordinary to discover that comparatively few people reach this level of maturity. They seem never to have paused to consider what has value for them. They spend great effort and sometimes make great sacrifices for values that, fundamentally, meet no real needs of their own. Perhaps they have imbibed the values of their particular profession or job, of their community or their neighbors, of their parents or family. Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.”- Eleanor Roosevelt

October 3rd, 2014
“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”- George Eliot, Middlemarch

October 2nd, 2014
“One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.”- Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

October 1st, 2014
“Some beautiful things are more dazzling when they are still imperfect than when they have been too perfectly crafted.”- La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections

September 30th, 2014
“When they had eventually calmed down a bit, and had gotten home, Mr. Duncan put the magic pebble in an iron safe. Some day they might want to use it, but really, for now, what more could they wish for? They all had all that they wanted.”- William Steig, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble

September 29th, 2014
“One must never be either content with, or impatient with, oneself.”- C. S. Lewis, Letter, March 31, 1954, reprinted in Letters to an American Lady

September 26th, 2014
“With what pleasure do we look upon a family, through the whole of which reign mutual love and esteem, where the parents and children are companions for one another, without any other difference than what is made by respectful affec- tion on the one side, and kind indulgence on the other, . . .”- Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

September 24th, 2014
“We all know people…who are at loggerheads with existence; unhappy people who never get what they want; are baffled, complaining, who stand at an uncomfortable angle when they see everything askew. There are others again who, though they appear perfectly content, seem to have lost all touch with reality. They lavish all their affections upon little dogs and old china. They take interest in nothing but the vicissitudes of their own health and the ups and downs of social snobbery. There are, however, others who strike us, why precisely it would be difficult to say, as being by nature or circumstances in a position where they can use their faculties to the full upon things that are of importance. They are not necessarily happy or successful, but there is a zest in their presence, an interest in their doings. They seem to be alive all over.”- Virginia Woolf, The Narrow Bridge of Art

September 23rd, 2014
“There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom!”- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

September 22nd, 2014
“But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.”- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

September 19th, 2014
“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”- Mary McCarthy, “The Vita Activa”, The New Yorker, October 18, 1958

September 18th, 2014
“Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it’s different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.- Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again

September 17th, 2014
“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”- Gertrude Stein, Paris France

September 16th, 2014
“I would like to become tolerant without overlooking anything, persecute no one even when all people persecute me; become better without noticing it; become sadder, but enjoy living; become more serene, be happy in others; belong to no one, grow in everyone; love the best, comfort the worst; not even hate myself anymore.”- Elias Canetti

September 15th, 2014
“If one thinks that one is happy, that is enough to be happy.”- Madame de la Fayette

September 12th, 2014
“It is never easy to confront life-changing news, especially when you are deeply embroiled in the everyday and the banal, which we always are. They absorb almost everything, make almost everything small, apart from the few events that are so immense that they lay waste to all the everyday trivia around you. Big news is like that and it is not possible to live inside it.”- Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 2

September 10th, 2014
“Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”- Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

September 9th, 2014
“With what pleasure do we look upon a family, through the whole of which reign mutual love and esteem, where the parents and children are companions for one another, without any other difference than what is made by respectful affection on the one side, and kind indulgence on the other; where freedom and fondness, mutual raillery and mutual kindness, shew that no opposition of interest divides the brothers, nor any rival ship of favors sets the sisters at variance, and where everything presents us with the idea of peace, cheerfulness, harmony, and contentment?”- Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

September 8th, 2014
“If we did not have pride, we would not complain of it in others.”- La Rochefoucauld

September 5th, 2014
“Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place, not for another hour but this hour…”- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

September 4th, 2014
“Who will free me from hurry, flurry, the feeling of a crowd pushing behind me, of being hustled and crushed? How can I regain even for a minute the feeling of ample leisure I had during my early, my creative years? Then I seldom felt fussed, or hurried. There was time for work, for play, for love, the confidence that if a task was not done at the appointed time, I easily could fit it into another hour. I used to take leisure for granted, as I did time itself.”- Bernard Berenson, Sunset and Twilight, from the Diaries of 1947-1958

September 3rd, 2014
“At these best moments a great humility fused with a great ambition: to be only what I was, but to the utmost of what I was.”- Stephen Spender, World Within World

September 2nd, 2014
“How few there are who have courage enough to own their Faults, or resolution enough to mend them!”- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac

September 1st, 2014
“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”- Arnold Toynbee

August 29th, 2014
“To be mature you have to realize what you value most. It is extraordinary to discover that comparatively few people reach this level of maturity. They seem never to have paused to consider what has value for them. They spend great effort and sometimes make great sacrifices for values that, fundamentally, meet no real needs of their own. Perhaps they have imbibed the values of their particular profession or job, of their community or their neighbors, of their parents or family. Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.”- Eleanor Roosevelt

August 28th, 2014
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”- Bertrand Russell

August 27th, 2014
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”- G.K. Chesterton

August 26th, 2014
“Children think not of what is past, nor what is to come, but enjoy the present time, which few of us do.”- Jean de La Bruyère

August 25th, 2014
“He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.”- Samuel Johnson

August 22nd, 2014
“We change, but always at a cost: to win this you lose that.”- Geoffrey Wolff, “Apprentice” in A Day at the Beach

August 21st, 2014
“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything… we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is golden for him who has the vision to realize it as such.”- Henry Miller

August 19th, 2014
“There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”- Francis Bacon

August 18th, 2014
“A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”- Eudora Welty

August 15th, 2014
“There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.”- Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self

August 14th, 2014
“With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”- C. S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy

August 13th, 2014
“Most of us are experts at solving other people’s problems, but we generally solve them in terms of our own and the advice we give is seldom for other people but for ourselves.”- Nan Fairbrother, The House in the Country

August 12th, 2014
“It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected. Looser types—people who are not busy weighing and measuring every little thing—are used to accidents, coincidences, chance, things getting out of hand, things sneaking up on them. They are the happy children of life, to whom life happens for better or worse.”- Laurie Colwin, “A Mythological Subject,” in The Lone Pilgrim

August 11th, 2014
“Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For It is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.”- Elias Canetti, Notes from Hampstead

August 8th, 2014
“To be mature you have to realize what you value most. It is extraordinary to discover that comparatively few people reach this level of maturity. They seem never to have paused to consider what has value for them. They spend great effort and sometimes make great sacrifices for values that, fundamentally, meet no real needs of their own. Perhaps they have imbibed the values of their particular profession or job, of their community or their neighbors, of their parents or family. Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.”- Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

August 7th, 2014
“A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”- Eudora Welty

August 6th, 2014
“I meant, I have said, to climb the Matterhorn. Why? Let’s say because I was there. No: I’m being flip. I meant to climb the Matterhorn because to climb it was for me so improbable. For too many years now I had failed to surprise myself, to reach beyond my grasp.”- Geoffrey Wolff, A Day at the Beach, “Matterhorn”

August 5th, 2014
“What we want out of a vacation changes as we age. It changes from vacation to vacation. There was a time when it was all about culture for me. My idea of a real break was to stay in museums until my legs ached and then go stand in line to get tickets for an opera or a play. Later I became a disciple of relaxation and looked for words like beach and massage when making my plans. I found those little paper umbrellas that balanced on the side of rum drinks to be deeply charming then. Now I strive for transcendent invisibility and the chance to accomplish the things I can’t get done at home. But as I pack up my room at the Hotel Bel-Air, I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.”- Ann Patchett, in “Do Not Disturb,” This Is The Story of a Happy Marriage

August 4th, 2014
“Dreams, books are each a world; and books, we know, Are a substantial world, both pure and good: Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness will grow.”- William Wordsworth

August 1st, 2014
“In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart.”- Henri Nouwen, The Genesee Diary

July 31st, 2014
“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”- Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

July 30th, 2014
“There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.”- Wallace Stevens

July 29th, 2014
“What is one’s personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.”- Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

July 28th, 2014
“The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the dominance of outward conditions.”- Robert Louis Stevenson

July 25th, 2014
“I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.”- Alberto Giacometti, Giacometti: A Biography

July 24th, 2014
“Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.”- Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

July 23rd, 2014
“I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”- Willa Cather, My Antonia

July 22nd, 2014
“A comfortable home is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.”- Sydney Smith

July 21st, 2014
“Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation.”- W.H. Sheldon

July 18th, 2014
“Energy creates energy. It is by spending myself that I become rich”- Sarah Bernhardt

July 17th, 2014
“Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.”- Carl Jung

July 16th, 2014
“Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”- Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

July 10th, 2014
“It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected. Looser types—people who are not busy weighing and measuring every little thing—are used to accidents, coincidences, chance, things getting out of hand, things sneaking up on them. They are the happy children of life, to whom life happens for better or worse.”- Laurie Colwin, “A Mythological Subject,” in The Lone Pilgrim

July 9th, 2014
“Silence is a strange thing to us who live: we desire it, we fear it, we worship it, we hate it. There is a divinity about cats, as long as they are silent: the silence of swans gives them an air of legend.”- Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem

July 7th, 2014
“Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature—not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant….As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.”- C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

July 4th, 2014
“Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings.”- Samuel Johnson

July 3rd, 2014
“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”- Mary McCarthy, “The Vita Activa,” The New Yorker, October 18, 1958

July 2nd, 2014
“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”- George Eliot, Middlemarch

July 1st, 2014
“Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.”- Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

June 30th, 2014
“I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.”
– Alberto Giacometti

June 27th, 2014
There can be no joy in living without joy in work.”- St. Thomas Aquinas

June 26th, 2014
“No money is better spent that what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.”
-Samuel Johnson

June 25th, 2014
“I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of Faults than I had imagined, but I had the Satisfaction of seeing them diminish.
-Benjamin Franklin

June 24th, 2014
“Would all, who cherish such wild wishes, but look around them, they would oftenest find their sphere of duty, of prosperity, and happiness, within those precincts, and in that station where Providence itself has cast their lot. Happy they who read the riddle without a weary world-search, or a lifetime spent in vain!”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

June 23rd, 2014

“The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach.”- Yutang Lin

June 20th, 2014
“There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.”- Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self

June 19th, 2014
“Sir, you must not neglect doing a thing immediately good from fear of remote evil; –from fear of its being abused.”- Samuel Johnson, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson

June 18th, 2014
“And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up.”- John Updike, Self-Consciousness

June 17th, 2014
“I like my town but I can’t say exactly what I like about it. I don’t think it’s the smell. I’m too accustomed to the monuments to want to look at them. I like certain lights, a few bridges, café terraces. I love passing through a place I haven’t seen for a long time.”- Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, “The Town”

June 16th, 2014
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

June 13th, 2014
“We can only know others by ourselves.”- Robert Louis Stevenson

June 12th, 2014
“Life is a roar of bargain and battle, but in the very heart of it there rises a mystic spiritual tone that gives meaning to the whole. It transmutes the dull details into romance. It reminds is that our only but wholly adequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole. It suggests that even while living we are living to ends outside ourselves.”- Oliver Wendell Holmes

June 11th, 2014
“If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it…if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.”- Robert Penn Warren

June 10th, 2014
“It isn’t enough to love; we must prove it.”- St. Therese of Lisieux, Story of a Soul

June 9th, 2014
“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”- Gertrude Stein, Paris, France

June 6th, 2014
“But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.”-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

June 5th, 2014
“There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work…that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself….The fact is, a person is so formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.”-Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

June 4th, 2014
“I like my town but I can’t say exactly what I like about it. I don’t think it’s the smell. I’m too accustomed to the monuments to want to look at them. I like certain lights, a few bridges, café terraces. I love passing through a place I haven’t seen for a long time.”-Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, “The Town”

June 3rd, 2014
“If people knew what Matisse, supposedly the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome to manage to capture that light which has never left him, if people knew all that, they would also realize that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials.”-Henri Matisse, interview, Matisse on Art

June 2nd, 2014
“We all know people…who are at loggerheads with existence; unhappy people who never get what they want; are baffled, complaining, who stand at an uncomfortable angle when they see everything askew. There are others again who, though they appear perfectly content, seem to have lost all touch with reality. They lavish all their affections upon little dogs and old china. They take interest in nothing but the vicissitudes of their own health and the ups and downs of social snobbery. There are, however, others who strike us, why precisely it would be difficult to say, as being by nature or circumstances in a position where they can use their faculties to the full upon things that are of importance. They are not necessarily happy or successful, but there is a zest in their presence, an interest in their doings. They seem to be alive all over.”-Virginia Woolf, “The Narrow Bridge of Art”

May 29th, 2014
“Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.”-Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

May 28th, 2014
“I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptation. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience, etc., don’t get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep picking ourselves up each time…The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give up.”-C.S. Lewis, Letters, January 20 1942

May 27th, 2014
“What we want out of a vacation changes as we age. It changes from vacation to vacation. There was a time when it was all about culture for me. My idea of a real break was to stay in museums until my legs ached and then go stand in line to get tickets for an opera or a play. Later I became a disciple of relaxation and looked for words like beach and massage when making my plans. I found those little paper umbrellas that balanced on the side of rum drinks to be deeply charming then. Now I strive for transcendent invisibility and the chance to accomplish the things I can’t get done at home. But as I pack up my room at the Hotel Bel-Air, I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.”-Ann Patchett, “Do Not Disturb,” in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

May 26th, 2014
“Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.”-William Wordsworth

May 23rd, 2014
“Pleasures are more safely postponed than virtues…greater loss is suffered by missing an opportunity of doing good, than an hour of giddy frolic and noisy merriment.”-Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings

May 22nd, 2014
“If one thinks that one is happy, that is enough to be happy.”-Madame de la Fayette

May 21st, 2014
“There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom!”-Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

May 20th, 2014
“I once saw a simple fish pond in a Japanese village which was perhaps eternal. A farmer made it for his farm. The pond was a simple rectangle, about 6 feet wide, and 8 feet long; opening off a little irrigation stream. At one end, a bush of flowers hung over the water. At the other end, under the water, was a circle of wood, its top perhaps 12 inches below the surface of the water. In the pond there were eight great ancient carp, each maybe 18 inches long, orange, gold, purple, and black: the oldest one had been there eighty years. The eight fish swam, slowly, slowly, in circles—often within the wooden circle. The whole world was in that pond. Every day the farmer sat by it for a few minutes. I was there only one day and I sat by it all afternoon. Even now, I cannot think about it without tears.”-Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

May 19th, 2014
“The [hay] rack stood as if it had been there forever across the landscape and lit by the sun with its long shadow behind it, and in harmony with every fold of the field and finally turned into a mere form, a primordial form, even if that was not the word I used then, and it gave me huge pleasure just to look at it. I can still feel the same thing today when I see a hayrack in a photograph from a book, but all that is a thing of the past now…so the feeling of pleasure slips into the feeling that time has passed, that it is very long ago, and the sudden feeling of being old.”-Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

May 16th, 2014
“I have reached the stage now where luxury is not in fine possessions but in carefree possessions, and the greatest luxury of all would be the completely expendable.”
– Nan Fairbrother, The House in the Country

May 15th, 2014
“Silence is a strange thing to us who live: we desire it, we fear it, we worship it, we hate it. There is a divinity about cats, as long as they are silent: the silence of swans gives them an air of legend.”-Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem

May 14th, 2014
“It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected. Looser types—people who are not busy weighing and measuring every little thing—are used to accidents, coincidences, chance, things getting out of hand, things sneaking up on them. They are the happy children of life, to whom life happens for better or worse.”-Laurie Colwin, “A Mythological Subject,” in The Lone Pilgrim

May 13th, 2014
“Some beautiful things are more dazzling when they are still imperfect than when they have been too perfectly crafted.”- La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections

May 12th, 2014
“Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”- Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings

May 9th, 2014
“With what pleasure do we look upon a family, through the whole of which reign mutual love and esteem, where the parents and children are companions for one another, without any other difference than what is made by respectful affec- tion on the one side, and kind indulgence on the other, . . .”-Adam Smith

May 8th, 2014
“They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”-Andy Warhol

May 7th, 2014
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”-Dwight D. Eisenhower

May 6th, 2014
“The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself; he who goes away pleased with himself and his own wit is also greatly pleased with you.”- Jean de La Brùyere

May 5th, 2014
“Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.”- William James

May 2nd, 2014
“No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.”-Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

May 1st, 2014
“Some beautiful things are more dazzling when they are still imperfect than when they have been too perfectly crafted.”-La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections

April 30th, 2014
“Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth,’ said his cousin. ‘But we seem to have no other.”-Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant

April 29th, 2014
“Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.”-Thomas Merton

April 28th, 2014
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”-George Moore

April 25th, 2014
“If we will have the kindness of others, we must endure their follies.”-Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings

April 24th, 2014
“One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.”-Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

April 23rd, 2014
“Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there–I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television–you don’t feel anything.
Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television. When you’re really really involved with something, you’re usually thinking about something else. When something’s happening, you fantasize about other things.”-Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

April 22nd, 2014
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”- Iris Murdoch

April 21st, 2014
“It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours…and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure.”-Robert Louis Stevenson

April 15th, 2014
“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”- Friedrich Nietzsche

April 14th, 2014
“One is happy as a result of one’s own efforts, once one knows of the necessary ingredients of happiness—simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self-denial to a point, love of work, and, above all, a clear conscience. Happiness is no vague dream, of that I now feel certain.”-George Sand

April 11th, 2014
“We would rather see those to whom we do good, than those who do good to us.”
– La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections

April 10th, 2014
“But if a man has commonly a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do not deny that molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere…. But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man…to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty I do not speak here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental limitations that are always falling across our path – bad weather, confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments or arrangements…”
– G.K. Chesterton, “The Advantages of Having One Leg”

April 9th, 2014
“To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”
– Bertrand Russell

April 8th, 2014
“To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.”
– Oscar Wilde

April 7th, 2014
“We seldom learn the true want of what we have till it is discovered that we can have no more.”
– Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings

April 4th, 2014
“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”
– Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings

April 3rd, 2014
“No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.”
– Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

April 2nd 2014
“Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk’s life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.”
– Thomas Merton

April 1st, 2014
“If we had no faults, we would not derive so much pleasure from noting those of other people.”
– La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections

March 31st, 2014
“You increase your self-respect when you feel you’ve done everything you ought to have done, and if there is nothing else to enjoy, there remains that chief of pleasures, the feeling of being pleased with oneself. A man gets an immense amount of satisfaction from the knowledge of having done good work and of having made the best use of his day, and when I am in this state I find that I thoroughly enjoy my rest and even the mildest forms of recreation.”
– Eugene Delacroix

March 28th, 2014
“The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading, and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires.”
– Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

March 27th, 2014
“To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”
– Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness

March 26th, 2014
“But if a man has commonly a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do not deny that molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere….But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man…to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty I do not speak here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental limitations that are always falling across our path – bad weather, confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments or arrangements…”
– G.K. Chesterton, The Advantages of Having One Leg

March 25th, 2014
“I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose.”
– Simone Weil, Waiting For God

March 24th, 2014
“Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it’s different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.”
– Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

March 21st, 2014
“Idleness is often covered by turbulence and hurry. He that neglects his known duty and real employment naturally endeavours to crowd his mind with something that may bar out the remembrance of his own folly, and does any thing but what he ought to do with eager diligence, that he may keep himself in his own favour.”
– Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings

March 20th, 2014
“It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.”
– M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf

March 19th, 2014
“When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

March 18th, 2014
“When one loves, one does not calculate.”
– St. Therese of Lisieux

March 17th, 2014
“The truest mark of being born with great qualities is to be born without envy.”
– La Rochefoucauld

March 14th, 2014
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”
– Iris Murdoch

March 13th, 2014
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
– G.K. Chesterton

March 11th, 2014
“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
– Joseph Addison

March 10th, 2014
“It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

March 7th, 2014
“She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”
– Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

March 6th, 2014
“Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.”
– Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness

March 5th, 2014
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
– G.K. Chesterton, “On Pleasure-Seeking”

March 4th, 2014
“I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.”
– Giacometti, in Giacometti: A Biography by James Lord

March 3rd, 2014
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
– Leo Tolstoy

February 28th, 2014
“You can never predict what little things in the way somebody looks or talks or acts will set off peculiar emotional reactions in other people.”
– Andy Warhol

February 27th, 2014
“The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.”
– Henry David Thoreau

February 26th, 2014
“To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.”
– Oscar Wilde

February 25th, 2014
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good…Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.”
– C.S. Lewis

February 24th, 2014
“To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise…Let him take a course of chemistry, or a course of rope-dance, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself.”
– Samuel Johnson

February 21st, 2014
“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

February 20th, 2014
“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
– Leo Tolstoy

February 19th, 2014
“It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

February 17th, 2014
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
– Willa Cather

February 14th, 2014
“Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation than folly.”
– Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, Upon Some Verses of Virgil

February 13th, 2014
“No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.”
– Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

February 12th, 2014
“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”
– Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings

February 11th, 2014
“Children think not of what is past, nor what is to come, but enjoy the present time, which few of us do.”
– Jean de La Bruyère

February 10th, 2014
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”
– Bertrand Russell

February 7th, 2014
“I will speak ill of no man and speak all the good I know of everybody.”
– Benjamin Franklin

February 6th, 2014
“To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real.”
– Winston Churchill

February 5th, 2014
“Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.”
– Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

February 4th, 2014
“How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.”
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

February 3rd, 2014
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
– Willa Cather

January 31st, 2014
“The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the dominance of the outward conditions.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

January 30th, 2014
“The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
– William Morris

January 29th, 2014
“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”
– Marcus Aurelius

January 28th, 2014
“Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them.”
– Robert Southey

January 27th, 2014
“My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.”
– Virginia Woolf

January 24th, 2014
“Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk’s life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.”
– Thomas Merton

January 23rd, 2014
“Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.”
– Samuel Johnson

January 22nd, 2014
“We are not so sensible of the greatest Health as of the least Sickness.”
– Benjamin Franklin

January 21st, 2014
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
– Samuel Butler

January 20th, 2014
“Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”
– Flannery O’Connor

January 17th, 2014
“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

January 16th, 2014
“To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.”
– Oscar Wilde

January 15th, 2014
“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”
– Marcus Aurelius

January 14th, 2014
“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”
– Leonardo da Vinci

January 13th, 2014
“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

January 10th, 2014
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good…Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.”
– C.S. Lewis

January 9th, 2014
“Who is strong? He that can conquer his bad habits.”
– Benjamin Franklin

January 8th, 2014
“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been before.”
– Diane Arbus

January 7th, 2014
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
– Willa Cather

January 6th, 2014
“Enough is abundance to the wise.”
– Euripide

January 3rd, 2014
“Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.”
– Twyla Tharp

January 2nd, 2014
“Love is patient, love is kind, It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”
– 1 Corinthians 13:4-5

December 31st, 2013
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
– Samuel Butler

December 30th, 2013
“What is one’s personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.”
– Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

December 27th, 2013
“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”
– Mary McCarthy

December 26th, 2013
“Energy creates energy. It is by spending myself that I become rich.”
– Sarah Bernhardt

December 25th, 2013
“The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer.”
– Bertrand Russell

December 24th, 2013
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
– George Moore

December 23rd, 2013
“We needs must love the highest when we see it.”
– Alfred Lord Tennyson

December 20th, 2013
“The pleasure of doing a thing in the same way at the same time every day, and savoring it, should be noted.”
– Arnold Bennett

December 19th, 2013
“Do not hunt for subjects, let them choose you, not you them. Only do that which insists on being done and runs right up against you, hitting you in the eye until you do it.”
– Samuel Butler

December 18th, 2013
“But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody. There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them.”
– George Orwell

December 17th, 2013
“Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. Every advance into knowledge opens new prospects, and produces new incitements to farther progress.”
– Samuel Johnson

December 13th, 2013
“A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
– Eudora Welty

December 12th, 2013
“We change, but always at a cost: to win this you lose that.”
– Geoffrey Wolff, A Day at the Beach, “Apprentice”

December 11th, 2013
“With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”
– C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

December 10th, 2013
“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”
– Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

December 9th, 2013
“If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”
– Charlie Parker

December 6th, 2013
“If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”
– Charlie Parker

December 5th, 2013
“We are so accustomed to disguising our true nature from others, that we end up disguising it from ourselves.”
– La Rochefoucauld

December 4th, 2013
“I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.”
– Flannery O’Connor

December 3rd, 2013
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
– Willa Cather

December 2nd, 2013
“When one loves, one does not calculate.”- St. Therese of Lisieux

November 29th, 2013
“There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.”- Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self

November 28th, 2013
“Most of us are experts at solving other people’s problems, but we generally solve them in terms of our own and the advice we give is seldom for other people but for ourselves.”- Nan Fairbrother, The House in the Country

November 27th, 2013
“What we want out of a vacation changes as we age. It changes from vacation to vacation. There was a time when it was all about culture for me. My idea of a real break was to stay in museums until my legs ached and then go stand in line to get tickets for an opera or a play. Later I became a disciple of relaxation and looked for words like beach and massage when making my plans. I found those little paper umbrellas that balanced on the side of rum drinks to be deeply charming then. Now I strive for transcendent invisibility and the chance to accomplish the things I can’t get done at home. But as I pack up my room at the Hotel Bel-Air, I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.”- Ann Patchett, “Do Not Disturb,” in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

November 26th, 2013
“The greatest of empires, is the empire over one’s self.”
– Publilius Syrus

November 25th, 2013
“I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptation. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience, etc., don’t get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep picking ourselves up each time…The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give up.”
– C.S. Lewis, Letters, January 20 1942

November 22nd, 2013
“When I think about what sort of person I would most like to have on a retainer, I think it would be a boss. A boss who could tell me what to do, because that makes everything easy when you’re working.”
– Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

November 21st, 2013
“But if a man has commonly a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do not deny that molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere…. But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man…to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty I do not speak here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental limitations that are always falling across our path – bad weather, confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments or arrangements…”
– G.K. Chesterton, “The Advantages of Having One Leg”

November 20th, 2013
“To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”
– Bertrand Russell

November 19th, 2013
“To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.”
– Oscar Wilde

November 18th, 2013
“She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it).”
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

November 15th, 2013
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”
– Bertrand Russell

November 14th, 2013
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
– G.K. Chesterton

November 13th, 2013
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”
– Iris Murdoch

November 12th, 2013
“Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.”
– William James

November 8th, 2013
“Meanwhile, as we read, two little girls slept as if couched on zephyrs on the south side of the parlor floor, in a room that had bunny wallpaper…and a bookcase crammed with the collected Beatrix Potter. Snow White was in a youth bed and Rose Red was in a crib, and next to them was the little blue and white guest room that one of them would have one day. Because I recognize emotions only in retrospect, I didn’t know that I was happy. As always, there was something nagging at my mind’s corners. But I did know that I had all that it is proper in this world to wish for.”
– Mary Cantwell

November 7th, 2013
“With what pleasure do we look upon a family, through the whole of which reign mutual love and esteem, where the parents and children are companions for one another, without any other difference than what is made by respectful affection on the one side, and kind indulgence on the other; where freedom and fondness, mutual raillery and mutual kindness, shew that no opposition of interest divides the brothers, nor any rivalship of favors sets the sisters at variance, and where everything presents us with the idea of peace, cheerfulness, harmony, and contentment?”
– Adam Smith

November 6th, 2013
“Arrears of small things to be attended to, if allowed to accumulate, worry and depress like unpaid debts. The main work should always stand aside for these, not these for the main work, as large debts should stand aside for small ones, or truth for common charity and good feeling. If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.”
– Samuel Butler

November 5th, 2013
“I would like to become tolerant without overlooking anything, persecute no one even when all people persecute me; become better without noticing it; become sadder, but enjoy living; become more serene, be happy in others; belong to no one, grow in everyone; love the best, comfort the worst; not even hate myself anymore.”
– Elias Canetti

November 4th, 2013
“…every life has at least one fairy palace in its span. Usually these miracles happen when a person is young, but still wide-eyed enough to catch the magic that older people have forgotten or pushed away. For countless children, Disneyland has it…For both tourists and natives, the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace does well…prancing horses, flashing sabers, plumes and capes and trumpets in the fog…the Palace is in safe hands, a solid dream.
Sometimes people can know two palaces before Lady Luck calls it quits, but of course they are never of equal enchantment…[For me] the lesser of the two palaces was the Pig’n’Whisle, a stylish ice-cream parlor in Los Angeles.”
– M. F. K. Fisher

November 1st, 2013
“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
– Joseph Addison

October 31st, 2013
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
– Willa Cather

October 30th, 2013
“Children think not of what is past, nor what is to come, but enjoy the present time, which few of us do.”
– Jean de La Bruyère

October 29th, 2013
“We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack.”
– Schopenhauer

October 25th, 2013
“To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise…Let him take a course of chemistry, or a course of rope-dance, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself.”
– Samuel Johnson

October 24th, 2013
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
– Leo Tolstoy

October 23rd, 2013
“Then he rustled his feathers, curved his slender neck, and cried joyfully, from the depths of his heart, ‘I never dreamed of such happiness as this, while I was an ugly duckling.”
– Hans Christian Andersen, Ugly Duckling

October 22nd, 2013
“It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

October 18th, 2013
“I like my town but I can’t say exactly what I like about it. I don’t think it’s the smell. I’m too accustomed to the monuments to want to look at them. I like certain lights, a few bridges, café terraces. I love passing through a place I haven’t seen for a long time.”
– Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, “The Town”

October 17th, 2013
“To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”
– Oscar Wilde

October 16th, 2013
“The mind…is rarely so disturbed, but that the company of a friend will restore it to some degree of tranquility and sedateness.”
– Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

October 15th, 2013
“There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.”
– George Eliot, Middlemarch

October 14th, 2013
“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

October 11th, 2013
“No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”
– John Ruskin

October 9th, 2013
“In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.”
– Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

October 8th, 2013
“I only study the things I like; I apply my mind only to matters that interest me. They’ll be useful—or useless—to me or to others in due course, I’ll be given—or not given—the opportunity of benefiting from what I’ve learned. In any case, I’ll have enjoyed the inestimable advantage of doing things I like doing and following my own inclinations.”
– Nicolas de Chamfort

October 7th, 2013
“There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one.”
– Jerome K. Jerome

October 4th, 2013
“Sir, you must not neglect doing a thing immediately good from fear of remote evil; –from fear of its being abused.”
– Samuel Johnson, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson

October 3rd, 2013
“There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.”
– Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self

October 2nd, 2013
“Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, going to bed again. There are a few more.
There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same. It is shocking at first, to see that there are so few patterns of events open to me.
Not that I want more of them. But when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.”
– Christopher Alexander

October 1st, 2013
“And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up.”
– John Updike, Self-Consciousness

September 30th, 2013
“It was on a bright day of midwinter, in New York. The little girl who eventually became me, but as yet was neither me nor anybody else in particular, but merely a soft anonymous morsel of humanity—this little girl, who bore my name, was going for a walk with her father. The episode is literally the first thing I can remember about her, and therefore I date the birth of her identity from that day.”
– Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

September 27th, 2013
“A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offense.”
– Proverbs 19:11

September 26th, 2013
“If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.”
– Flannery O’Connor, letter to “A,” 10 Feb 62

September 24th, 2013
“Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.”
– C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

September 23rd, 2013
“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”
– Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

September 20th, 2013
“Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
– Kierkegaard, letter, 1847

September 19th, 2013
“Whatever creates or increases happiness or some part of happiness, we ought to do; whatever destroys or hampers happiness, or gives rise to its opposite, we ought not to do.”
– Aristotle, Rhetoric

September 18th, 2013
“But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.”
– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

September 17th, 2013“There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work…that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself…. The fact is, a person is so formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.”
– Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

September 16th, 2013
“Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?”
– Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

September 13th, 2013
“It isn’t enough to love; we must prove it.”
– St. Therese of Lisieux

September 12th, 2013
“There can be no joy in living without joy in work.”
– St. Thomas Aquinas

September 11th, 2013
“Since every man is obliged to promote happiness and virtue, he should be careful not to mislead unwary minds, by appearing to set too high a value upon things by which no real excellence is conferred.”
– Samuel Johnson

September 10th, 2013
“The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.”
– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

September 9th, 2013
“Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know, Are a substantial world, both pure and good: Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness will grow.”
– William Wordsworth

September 6th, 2013
“My greatest skill has been to want but little.”
– Henry David Thoreau

September 4th, 2013
“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”
– Flannery O’Connor

September 3rd, 2013
“A good conscience is a continual Christmas.”
– Benjamin Franklin

September 2nd, 2013
“When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.”
– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

August 30th, 2013
“To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real.”
– Winston Churchill

August 29th, 2013
“There is a charm, even for homely things, in perfect maintenance.”
– Louis Auchincloss

August 28th, 2013
“…the true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life…”
– William Morris

August 27th, 2013
“All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.”
– Matthew Arnold

August 26th, 2013
“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”
– Gertrude Stein

August 23rd, 2013
“The greatest of empires, is the empire over one’s self.”
– Publius Syrus

August 22nd, 2013
“Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.”
– William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

August 21st, 2013
“A state of affairs which leads to daily vexation is not the right state.”
– Goethe

August 20th, 2013
“Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays: but she always felt—and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness—a little relieved when they were over. Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she should find herself unable to get back.”
– Jan Struther, Mrs. Miniver

August 19th, 2013
“The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else.”
– Eric Hoffer

August 12th, 2013
“Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays: but she always felt—and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness—a little relieved when they were over. Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she should find herself unable to get back.”
– Jan Struther, Mrs. Miniver

August 9th, 2013
“If one thinks that one is happy, that is enough to be happy.”
– Madame de la Fayette

August 8th, 2013
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
– Samuel Butler

August 5th, 2013
“The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself; he who goes away pleased with himself and his own wit is also greatly pleased with you.”
– Jean de La Brùyere

August 2nd, 2013
“The Little House was very happy as she sat on the hill and watched the countryside around her. She watched the sun rise in the morning and she watched the sun set in the evening. Day followed day, each one a little different from the one before . . . but the Little House stayed just the same.”
– Virginia Lee Burton, The Little House

August 1st, 2013
“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”
– Logan Pearsall Smith

July 31st, 2013
“One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.”
– Simone Weil

July 30th, 2013
“One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.”
– Elias Canetti

July 29th, 2013
“The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the dominance of the outward conditions.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

July 26th, 2013
“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.”
– Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

July 25th, 2013
“Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.”
– William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

July 24th, 2013
“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

July 23rd, 2013
“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.”
– Diane Arbus

July 22nd, 2013
“To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations.”
– Emily Dickinson, letter

July 18th, 2013
“Where Thou art—that—is Home—.”
– Emily Dickinson

July 17th, 2013
“Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

July 16th, 2013
“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been before.”
– Diane Arbus

July 15th, 2013
“The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
– William Morris

July 12th, 2013
“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”
– Gertrude Stein

July 11th, 2013
“Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them.”
– Robert Southey

July 10th, 2013
“My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.”
– Virginia Woolf

July 9th, 2013
“On the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet as I was, by the Endeavor, a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”
– Benjamin Franklin

July 5th, 2013
“The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.”
– William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

July 4th, 2013
“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.”
– Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

July 3rd, 2013
“Begin by instructing yourself, then you will receive instruction from others.”
– Goethe

July 2nd, 2013
“To see things in their true proportion, to escape the magnifying influence of a morbid imagination, should be one of the chief aims of life.”
– The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky

July 1st, 2013
“In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart.”
– Henri Nouwen, The Genesee Diary

June 28th, 2013
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”
– Bertrand Russell

June 26th, 2013
“Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it’s different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.”
– Andy Warhol

June 25th, 2013
“I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.”
– Giacometti

June 24th, 2013
“To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.”
– Samuel Johnson

June 21st, 2013
“There is something in living close to the great elemental forces of nature that causes people to rise above small annoyances and discomforts.”
– Laura Ingalls Wilder, essay, February 1917

June 20th, 2013
“The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.”
– William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

June 19th, 2013
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
– Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning

June 18th, 2013
“To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations.”
– Emily Dickinson, letter

June 17th, 2013
“To be mature you have to realize what you value most. It is extraordinary to discover that comparatively few people reach this level of maturity. They seem never to have paused to consider what has value for them. They spend great effort and sometimes make great sacrifices for values that, fundamentally, meet no real needs of their own. Perhaps they have imbibed the values of their particular profession or job, of their community or their neighbors, of their parents or family. Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt

June 14th, 2013
“In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: They must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it.”
– John Ruskin

June 13th, 2013
“It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.”
– William Butler Yeats

June 12th, 2013
“I would like to become tolerant without overlooking anything, persecute no one even when all people persecute me; become better without noticing it; become sadder, but enjoy living; become more serene, be happy in others; belong to no one, grow in everyone; love the best, comfort the worst; not even hate myself anymore.”
– Elias Canetti

June 11th, 2013
“Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”
– Flannery O’Connor

June 10th, 2013
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”
– Buddha

June 7th, 2013
“We are all born for love…It is the principle of existence, and its only end.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

June 6th, 2013
“The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

June 4th, 2013
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
– George Moore

June 3rd, 2013
“Stay, stay at home, my heart and rest; Home-keeping hearts are the happiest, For those that wander they know not where Are full of trouble and full of care; To stay at home is best.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

May 31st, 2013
“After all, a vacation is not a matter of place or time. We can take a wonderful vacation in spirit, even though we are obliged to stay at home, if we will only drop our burdens from our minds for a while. But no amount of travel will give us rest and recreation if we carry our work and worries with us.”
– Laura Ingalls Wilder, essay September 1919

May 30th, 2013
“Forever — is composed of nows –“
– Emily Dickinson

May 29th, 2013
“Quitting smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know. I’ve done it a thousand times.”
– Mark Twain

May 28th, 2013
“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.”
- Oscar Wilde

May 27th, 2013
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
– G.K. Chesterton

May 24th, 2013
“The greatest of empires, is the empire over one’s self.”
-Publius Syrus

May 23rd, 2013
“Best is good. Better is best.”
-Lisa Grunwald

May 22, 2013
“To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations.”
-Emily Dickinson, letter

May 21st, 2013
“I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of Faults than I had imagined, but I had the Satisfaction of seeing them diminish.”
-Benjamin Franklin

May 20th, 2013
“We needs must love the highest when we see it.”
-Alfred Lord Tennyson

May 17th, 2013
“The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.”
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

May 16th, 2013
“We can only know others by ourselves.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

May 15th, 2013
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”
-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

May 14th, 2013
“To see things in their true proportion, to escape the magnifying influence of a morbid imagination, should be one of the chief aims of life.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky

May 13th, 2013
“How often things occur by mere chance which we dared not even hope for.”
-Terence

May 10th, 2013
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

May 9th, 2013
“The sacrifice of pleasures is of course itself a pleasure.”
-Muriel Spark, Loitering With Intent

May 8th, 2013
“Every man is, no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own care; and as he is fitter to take care of himself, than of any other person, it is fit and right that it should be so.”
-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

May 7th, 2013
“She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it).”
-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

May 6th, 2013
“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.”
-Oscar Wilde

May 3rd, 2013
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
-G.K. Chesterton

May 2nd, 2013
“I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose.”
-Simone Weil, Waiting For God

May 1st, 2013
“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

April 30th, 2013
“Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it’s different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.”
-Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

April 29th, 2013
“Since every man is obliged to promote happiness and virtue, he should be careful not to mislead unwary minds, by appearing to set too high a value upon things by which no real excellence is conferred.”
-Samuel Johnson

April 26th, 2013
“The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
-William Morris

April 25th, 2013
“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”
-Gertrude Stein

April 24th, 2013
“We are interested in others, when they are interested in us.”
-Publius Syrus

April 23rd, 2013
“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”
-Marcus Aurelius

April 22nd, 2013
“Safe! safe! safe!’ the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry ‘Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”
-Virginia Woolf

April 19th, 2013
“Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them.”
-Robert Southey

April 18th, 2013
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
-William Morris

April 17th, 2013
“My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.”
-Virginia Woolf

April 16th, 2013
“There is almost one time that is important— Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.”
-Leo Tolstoy

April 12th, 2013
“Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.”
-Thomas Merton

April 11th, 2013
“I suppose the more you have to do, the more you learn to organize and concentrate—or else get fragmented into bits. I have learned to use my ‘ten minutes’. I once thought it was not worth sitting down for a time as short as that; now I know differently and, if I have ten minutes, I use them, even if they bring only two lines, and it keeps the book alive.”
-Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms

April 9th, 2013
“He who chases two hares will catch neither.”
-Publius Syrus

April 8th, 2013
“Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature—not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant….As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.”
-C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

April 5th, 2013
“On the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet as I was, by the Endeavor, a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”
-Benjamin Franklin

April 4th, 2013
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
-George Moore

April 3rd, 2013
“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”
-William Butler Yeats

April 2nd, 2013
“A man is not only happy but wise also, if he is trying, during his lifetime, to be the sort of man he wants to be found at his death.”
-Thomas à Kempis

March 28th, 2013
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
-William Blake

March 27th, 2013
“I suppose the more you have to do, the more you learn to organise and concentrate—or else get fragmented into bits. I have learned to use my ‘ten minutes’. I once thought it was not worth sitting down for a time as short as that; now I know differently and, if I have ten minutes, I use them, even if they bring only two lines, and it keeps the book alive.”
-Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms

March 26th, 2013
“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends.”
-Samuel Johnson

March 25th, 2013
“We are interested in others, when they are interested in us.”
-Publius Syrus

March 22nd, 2013
“Everything that frees our spirit without giving us control of ourselves is ruinous.”
-Goethe

March 21st, 2013
“There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”
-Francis Bacon

March 20th, 2013
“To create a little flower is the labour of ages.”
-William Blake

March 19th, 2013
“It is folly for him to rule over others who cannot govern himself.”
-Publius Syrus

March 18th, 2o13
“We can only know others by ourselves.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

March 14th, 2013
“I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.”
-Henry David Thoreau

March 13th, 2013
“Routine shortens and variety lengthens time, and it is therefore in the power of men to do something to regulate its pace. A life with many landmarks, a life which is much subdivided when those subdivisions are not of the same kind, and when new and diverse interests, impressions, and labours follow each other in swift and distinct successions, seems the most long…”
-Lecky, The Map of Life

March 12th, 2013
“One should not wish anyone disagreeable conditions of life; but for him who is involved in them by chance, they are touchstones of characters and of the most decisive value to man.”
-Goethe

March 11th, 2013
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
-Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meanin

March 8th, 2013
“Now run along and play, but don’t get into trouble. George promised to be good. But it is easy for little monkeys to forget.”
-H.A. Rey, Curious George

March 7th, 2013
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. . . Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.”
-C.S. Lewis

March 6th, 2013
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”
-Iris Murdoch

March 4th, 2013
“In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart.”
-Henri Nouwen, The Genesee Diary

March 1st, 2013
“Choose which seems best and, in the doing, it will become agreeable and easy.”
-Pythagoras

February 28th, 2013
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
-Leo Tolstoy

February 26th, 2013
“He was like a man owning a piece of ground in which, unknown to himself, a treasure lay buried. You would not call such a man rich, neither would I call happy the man who is so without realizing it.”
-Eugène Delacroix

February 25th, 2013
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”
-Bertrand Russell

February 22nd, 2013
“We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack.”
-Schopenhauer

February 21st, 2013
“Children think not of what is past, nor what is to come, but enjoy the present time, which few of us do.”
-Jean de La Bruyère

February 20th, 2013
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
-Willa Cather

February 19th, 2013
“Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky

February 18th, 2013
“Begin by instructing yourself, then you will receive instruction from others.”
-Goethe

February 15th, 2013
“Passions weaken, but habits strengthen, with age, and it is the great task of youth to set the current of habit and to form the tastes which are most productive of happiness in life.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky

February 14th, 2013
“To be driven by our appetites alone is slavery, while to obey a law that we have imposed on ourselves is freedom.”
-Rousseau, The Social Contract

February 13th, 2013
“Silence was the cure, if only temporarily, silence and geography. But of what was I being cured? I do not know, have never known. I only know the cure. Silence, and no connections except to landscape.”
-Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young

February 11th, 2013
“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
-Joseph Addison

February 8th, 2013
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”
-Epicurus

February 7th, 2013
“How can we learn self-knowledge? Never by taking thought but rather by action. Try to do your duty and you’ll soon discover what you’re like.”
-Goethe

February 6th, 2013
“Each time of life has its own kind of love.”
-Leo Tolstoy

February 5th, 2013
“All wisdom is not new wisdom.”
-Winston Churchill

February 4th, 2013
“It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

February 1st, 2013
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

January 31st, 2013
“I had wanted to come back to Greenwich Village ever since I had left Waverly Place, and since moving to West Eleventh Street, I have never lived anyplace else. I do not want to. That is not because of what the Village is but because of what I have made it, and what I have made it depends on who I am at the time.”
-Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young

January 30th, 2013
“He who is and remains true to himself and to others has the most attractive quality of the greatest talent.”
-Goethe

January 29th, 2013
“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
-Leo Tolstoy

January 28th, 2013
“He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.”
-Samuel Johnson

January 25th, 2013
“Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.”
-Carl Jung

January 24th, 2013
“If one thinks that one is happy, that is enough to be happy.”
-Madame de la Fayette

January 23rd, 2013
“No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”
-John Ruskin

January 22nd, 2013
“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”
-Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

January 21st, 2013
“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

January 18th, 2013
“The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.”
-Joseph Addison

January 17th, 2013
“What lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.”
-Aristotle

January 16th, 2013
“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
-George Santayana

January 15th, 2013
“That which gives the strongest habitual pleasure, whether it be innate or acquired, will in the great majority of cases ultimately dominate.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky

January 14th, 2013
“The most congenial social occasions are those ruled by cheerful deference of each for all.”
-Goethe

January 11th, 2013
“With what pleasure do we look upon a family, through the whole of which reign mutual love and esteem, where the parents and children are companions for one another, without any other difference than what is made by respectful affection on the one side, and kind indulgence on the other.”
-Adam Smith

January 10th, 2013
“Of all the tasks which are set before man in life, the education and management of his character is the most important, and, in order that it should be successfully pursued, it is necessary that he should make a calm and careful survey of his own tendencies, unblinded either by the self-deception which conceals errors and magnifies excellences, or by the indiscriminate pessimism which refuses to recognize his powers for good. He must avoid the fatalism which would persuade him that he has no power over his nature, and he must also clearly recognize that this power is not unlimited.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky

January 9th, 2013
“His mother saw that he was not lonesome, and because she was an understanding mother, even though she was a cow, she let him just sit there and be happy.”
-Munro Leaf, The Story of Ferdinand

January 8th, 2013
“The most congenial social occasions are those ruled by cheerful deference of each for all.”
-Goethe

January 7th, 2013
“Sir, you must not neglect doing a thing immediately good from fear of remote evil; from fear of its being abused.”
-Samuel Johnson

January 4th, 2013
“The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.”
-Montaigne

January 3rd, 2013
“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

January 2nd, 2013
“They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
-Andy Warhol

January 1st, 2013
“Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place, not for another hour but this hour.”
-Walt Whitman

December 31st, 2012
“If you make it a habit not to blame others, you will feel the growth of the ability to love in your soul, and you will see the growth of goodness in your life.”
-Leo Tolstoy

December 28th, 2012
“Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky

December 27th, 2012
“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

December 26th, 2012
“Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.”
-Confucious

December 25th, 2012
“Exuberance is beauty.”
-William Blake

December 24th, 2012
“Things do not change; we change.”
-Henry David Thoreau

December 21st, 2012
“When they had eventually calmed down a bit, and had gotten home, Mr. Duncan put the magic pebble in an iron safe. Some day they might want to use it, but really, for now, what more could they wish for? They all had all that they wanted.”
-William Steig, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble

December 20th, 2012
“…the man who works so moderately as to be able to work constantly, not only preserves his health the longest, but in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of works.”
-Adam Smith

December 19th, 2012
“There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.”
-Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self

December 17th, 2012
“Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, going to bed again. There are a few more.
There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same. It is shocking at first, to see that there are so few patterns of events open to me.
Not that I want more of them. But when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.”
-Christopher Alexander

December 14th, 2012
“A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
-Eudora Welty

December 13th, 2012
“Anxiety and Ennui are the Scylla and Charybdis on which the bark of human happiness is most often wrecked.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky

December 12th, 2012
“Associate with people who are likely to improve you.”
-Seneca

December 11th, 2012
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
-Samuel Butler

December 10th, 2012
“Who is strong? He that can conquer his bad habits.”
-Benjamin Franklin

December 7th, 2012
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

December 6th, 2012
“Enough is abundance to the wise.”
-Euripides

December 5th, 2012
“Happiness is a place between too much and too little.”
-Finnish proverb

December 4th, 2012
“It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

December 3rd, 2012
“Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.”
-Bertrand Russell

November 29th, 2012
“The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.”
-Buddha

November 26th, 2012
“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its own focus.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

November 23rd, 2012
“The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the dominance of the outward conditions.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

November 22nd, 2012
“To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy.”
-Samuel Johnson

November 21st, 2012
“One lives in the naive notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.”
-Elias Canetti

November 20th, 2012
“One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.”
-Simone Weil

November 19th, 2012
“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”
-Logan Pearsall Smith

November 16th, 2012
“Where Thou art-that-is Home.”
-Emily Dickinson

November 15th, 2012
“Let us decide on the route that we wish to take to pass our life, and attempt to sow that route with flowers.”
-Madame du Chatelet

November 14th, 2012
“Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

November 13th, 2012
“It is difficult to bring people to goodness with lessons, but it is easy to do so by example.”
-Seneca

November 12th, 2012
“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been before.”
-Diane Arbus

November 9th, 2012
“The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
-William Morris

November 8th, 2012
“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”
-Gertrude Stein

November 7th, 2012
“What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.”
-Samuel Johnson

November 6th, 2012
“Read the best books first, otherwise you’ll find you do not have time.”
-Henry David Thoreau

November 5th, 2012
“Read at whim! Read at whim!”
-Randall Jarrell

November 2nd, 2012
“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”
-Marcus Aurelius

November 1st, 2012
“Life is not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

October 31st, 2012
“’Safe! safe! safe!’ the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry ‘Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.’”
-Virginia Woolf

October 30th, 2012
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
-Voltaire

October 29th, 2012
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.
-William Morris

October 26th, 2012
“My mind work in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.”
-Virginia Woolf

October 25th, 2012
“Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am.”
-Thomas Merton

October 24th, 2012
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
-George Moore

October 23rd, 2012
“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”
-William Butler Yeats

October 19th, 2012
“Each time of life has its own kind of love.”
-Leo Tolstoy

October 18th, 2012
“A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offense.”
-Proverbs 19:11

October 17th, 2012
“For the love of God and my sisters (so charitable towards me) I take care to appear happy and especially to be so.”
-St. Therese of Lisieux

October 16th, 2012
“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends…”
-Samuel Johnson

October 15th, 2012
“It is much easier to extinguish a first desire than to satisfy all of those that follow it.”
-La Rochefoucauld

October 12th, 2012
“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends…”
-Samuel Johnson

October 11th, 2012
“Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”
-Flannery O’Connor

October 10th, 2012
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
-Samuel Butler

October 9th, 2012
“We prefer to see those to whom we do good than those who do good to us.”
-La Rochefoucauld

October 8th, 2012
“Order is heaven’s first law.”
-Alexander Pope

October 5th, 2012
“You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.”
-W. Somerset Maugham

October 4th, 2012
“…that best portion of a good man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love.”
-William Wordsworth

October 3rd, 2012
“But I don’t think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.”
-Virginia Woolf

October 2nd, 2012
“Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us be therefore cautious of how we strip her.”
-Samuel Johnson

October 1st, 2012
“The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.”
-Walt Whitman

September 28th, 2012
“Ah! There is nothing like staying home for real comfort.”
-Jane Austen

September 27th, 2012
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”
-Henry David Thoreau

September 26th, 2012
“Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.”
-Bertrand Russell

September 25th, 2012
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
-William Shakespeare

September 24th, 2012
“Our life is the creation of our mind.”
-Buddha

September 20th, 2012
“Choose what is best, and habit will make it pleasant and easy.”
-Plutarch

September 19th, 2012
“You can observe a lot by watching.”
-Yogi Berra

September 18th, 2012
“For surely to be wise is the most desirable thing in all the world.”
-Cicero

September 17th, 2012
“Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.”
-Michel de Montaigne

September 14th, 2012
“To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”
-Bertrand Russell

September 13th, 2012
“Everyone thinking of changing the world, buy no one thinks of changing himself.”
-Leo Tolstoy

September 12th, 2012
“Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings.”
-Samuel Johnson

September 11th, 2012
“To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”
-Oscar Wilde

September 10th, 2012
“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ectasy at your feet.”
-Franz Kafka

September 7th, 2012
“Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.”
-Diane Arbus

September 6th, 2012
“Let us decide on the route that we wish to take to pass our life, and attempt to sow that route with flowers. ”
-Madame du Chatelet

September 5th, 2012
“…the true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life…”
-William Morris

September 4th, 2012
“The only cure [for envy] in the case of ordinary men and women is happiness, and the difficulty is that envy is itself a terrible obstacle to happiness.”
-Bertrand Russell

September 3rd, 2012
“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for.”
-Oscar Wilde

August 31, 2012
“Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation.”
-W.H. Sheldon

August 30th, 2012
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

August 29th, 2012
“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”
-George Eliot

August 28th, 2012
“To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”
-Bertrand Russell

August 27th, 2012
“The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”
-Ayn Rand

August 24th, 2012
“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”
-Mary McCarthy

August 23rd, 2012
“To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.”
-Oscar Wilde

August 22nd, 2012
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good…Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.”
-C.S. Lewis

August 21st, 2012
“The secret of success is constancy to purpose.”
-Disraeli

August 20th, 2012
“Man’s life is a progress, not a station.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

August 17th, 2012
“The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the dominance of outward conditions.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

August 16th, 2012
“Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation.”
-W.H. Sheldon

August 15th, 2012
“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”
-Guillaume Appollinaire

August 14th, 2012
“The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach.”
-Lin Yutang

August 13th, 2012
“This is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
-Willa Cather

August 10th, 2012
“It makes me happy to encounter goodness, love of work, humane intelligence, and people no matter at what kind of job, be it ever so humble, or ever so exalted, who do it well and con amore.”
-Bernard Berenson

August 9th, 2012
“Maybe the reason my memory is so bad is that I always do at least two things at once. It’s easier to forget something you only half-did or quarter did.”
-Andy Warhol

August 8th, 2012
“Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.”
-Bertrand Russell

August 7th, 2012
“It isn’t enough to love; we must prove it.”
-St. Therese of Lisieux

August 6th, 2012
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.”
-Voltaire

August 3rd, 2012
“Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor’s of the mind.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

August 2nd, 2012
“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”
-Mary McCarthy

August 1st, 2012
“He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.”
-Goethe

July 31st, 2012
“A comfortable home is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.”
-Sydney Smith

July 30th, 2012
“It is difficult to bring people to goodness with lessons, but it is easy to do so by example.”
-Seneca

July 27th, 2012
“To have management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise…Let [a man] take a course of chemistry, or a course of rope-dance, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself.”
-Samuel Johnson

July 26th, 2012
“I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.”
-Alberto Giacometti

July 25th, 2012
“Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it’s different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.”
-Andy Warhol

July 24, 2012
“Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in persons and things.”
-Bertrand Russell

July 23st, 2012
“Energy creates energy. It is by spending myself that I become rich.”
-Sarah Bernhardt

July 20th, 2012
“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”
-Gertrude Stein

July 19th, 2012
“…the true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life…”
-William Morris

July 18th, 2012
“It needs good management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or less attention that we give to it…The shorter my possession of life the deeper and fuller I must make it.”
-Michel de Montaigne

July 17th, 2012
“Happiness is a place between too much and too little.”
-Finnish proverb

July 16th, 2012
“To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy.”
-Samuel Johnson

July 13th, 2012
“As soon as you stop wanting something you get it. I’ve found that to be absolutely axiomatic.”
-Andy Warhol

July 12th, 2012
“Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.”
-Bertrand Russell

July 3rd, 2012
“A man is not only happy but wise also, if he is trying, during his lifetime, to be the sort of man he wants to be found at his death.”
-Thomas à Kempis

July 2nd, 2012
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”
-Buddha

June 29th, 2012
“When I think about what sort of person I would most like to have on a retainer, I think it would be a boss. A boss who could tell me what to do, because that makes everything easy when you’re working.”
-Andy Warhol

June 28th, 2012
“When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

June 27th, 2012
“A merry heart doeth good [like] a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”
-Proverbs 17:22

June 26th, 2012
“One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.”
-Simone Weil

June 25th, 2012
“Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.”
-Bertrand Russell

June 21st, 2012
“It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable suprises.”
-M.F.K. Fisher

June 20th, 2012
“The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer.”
-Bertrand Russell

June 19th, 2012
“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

June 18th, 2012
“The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.”
-Abraham Lincoln

June 15th, 2012
“Blessed is the man who has found his work. Let him ask no other blessedness.”
-Thomas Carlyle

June 14th, 2012
“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”
-Logan Pearsall Smith

June 13th, 2012
“I would like to become tolerant without overlooking anything, persecute no one even when all people persecute me; become better without noticing it; become sadder, but enjoy living; become more serene, be happy in others; belong to no one, grow in everyone; love the best, comfort the worst; not even hate myself anymore.”
-Elias Canetti

June 12, 2012
“If we did not have pride, we would not complain of it in others.”
-La Rochefoucauld

June 11, 2012
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.”
-Voltaire

June 8th, 2012
“Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.”
-Confucious

June 7th, 2012
“Since every man is obliged to promote happiness and virtue, he should be careful not to mislead unwary minds, by appearing to set too high a value upon things by which no real excellence is conferred.”
-Samuel Johnson

June 6th, 2012
“What lies in our power to do, lies in our power not to do.”
-Aristotle

June 5th, 2012
“All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.”
-William James

June 4th, 2012
“There is almost one time that is important – Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.”
-Leo Tolstoy

June 1st, 2012
“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
-George Santayana

May 31, 2012
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
-G.K. Chesterton

May 30th, 2012
“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

May 29th, 2012
“As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly.”
-Samuel Johnson

May 28th, 2012
“It is easier to resist at the begining than at the end.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

May 25th, 2012
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”
-Bertrand Russell

May 24th, 2012
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
-Leo Tolstoy

May 23nd, 2012
“Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings.”
-Samuel Johnson

May 22nd, 2012
“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”
-Marcus Aurelius

May 21st, 2012
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”
-Iris Murdoch

May 18th, 2012
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good…Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.”
-C.S. Lewis

May 17th, 2012
“As soon as you stop wanting something you get it. I’ve found that to be absolutely axiomatic.”
-Andy Warhol

May 16th, 2012
“Choose which seems best and, in the doing, it will become agreeable and easy.”
-Pythagoras

May 15th, 2012
“The secret of success is constancy to purpose.”
-Benjamin Disraeli

May 14th, 2012
“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
-Romans 7: 15-16

May 11th, 2012
“A comfortable home is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.”
-Sydney Smith

May 10th, 2012
“Life is not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

May 9th, 2012
“It is difficult to bring people to goodness with lessons, but it is easy to do so by example.”
-Seneca

May 8th, 2012
“Who is strong? He that can conquer his bad habits.”
-Benjamin Franklin

May 7th, 2012
“Home was quite a place when people stayed there.”
-E.B. White

May 4th, 2012
“Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings.”
-Samuel Johnson

May 3rd, 2012
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
-Samuel Butler

May 2nd, 2012
“The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.”-Buddha

May 1st, 2012
“It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light.”
-G.K. Chesterton

April 30th, 2012
“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.” -Leonardo da Vinci

April 27th, 2012
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.” -George Moore

April 26th, 2012
“Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.” -Carl Jung

April 25th, 2012
“We needs must love the highest when we see it.” -Alfred Lord Tennyson

April 24th, 2012
“Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.”-Ralph Waldo Emerson

April 23rd, 2012
“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been before.”-Diane Arbus

April 20th, 2012
“If you make it a habit not to blame others, you will feel the growth of the ability to love in your soul, and you will see the growth of goodness in your life.”
— Leo Tolstoy

April 19th, 2012
“The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largly freed, from the dominance of outward conditions.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson

April 17th, 2012
“Let us decide on the route that we wish to take to pass our life, and attempt to sow that route with flowers.”
— Madame du Chatelet

April 16th, 2012
“They always say that times changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
— Andy Warhol

April 13th, 2012
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
— Willa Cather

April 12th, 2012
“In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.”
— John Cage

April 10th, 2012
“The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself; he who goes away pleased with himself and his own wit is also greatly pleased with you.”
— La Bruyere

April 9th, 2012
“Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”
— 1 Corinthians 13:4-5

April 6th, 2012
“If one thinks that one is happy, that is enough to be happy.”
— Madame de la Fayette

April 5th, 2012
“Enough is abundance to the wise.”— Euripide

April 4th, 2012
“Abstinence is as easy to me, as temperance would be difficult.”
— Samuel Johnson

April 3rd, 2012
“All wisdom is not new wisdom.”
— Winston Churchill

April 2nd, 2012
“Exuberance is beauty.”
— William Blake

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Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin
is one of the most thought-provoking and influential writers on habits and happiness. Her next book, Better than Before, is about how we change our habits. Her books The Happiness Project and Happier at Home were both instant New York Times bestsellers, and The Happiness Project spent more than two years on the bestseller list, including at #1. Her books have sold more than two million copies, in 30 languages. Here, she writes about her adventures as she test-drives ideas from contemporary science and ancient wisdom about building good habits and a happier life.

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